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Category: Seminars

The steep rise in neighborhood associations in post-Katrina New Orleans is commonly presented in starkly positive or negative terms – either romanticized narratives of community influence or dismissals of false consciousness and powerlessness to elite interests.

In A Neighborhood Politics of Last Resort Stephen Danley offers a messier and ultimately more complete picture of these groups as simultaneously crucial but tenuous social actors. Through a comparative case study based on extensive fieldwork in post-Katrina New Orleans, Danley follows activists in their efforts to rebuild their communities, while also examining the dark underbelly of NIMBYism (“not in my backyard”), characterized by racism and classism. He elucidates how neighborhood activists were tremendously inspired in their defense of their communities, at times outwitting developers or other perceived threats to neighborhood life, but they could be equally creative in discriminating against potential neighbors and fighting to keep others out of their communities.

Considering the plight of grassroots activism in the context of national and global urban challenges, A Neighborhood Politics of Last Resort immerses the reader in the daily minutiae of post-Katrina life to reveal how multiple groups responded to the same crisis with inconsistent and often ad-hoc approaches, visions, and results.

To date, cities have not fully utilized employee ownership as an economic development strategy––as a means to retain businesses, improve the quality of jobs, and expand the local tax base. In this short lecture, Chris Michael will share personal experiences with initiatives in New York City and Newark, NJ that aim to increase the number and size of employee-owned businesses in the local region. As context, he will also relate findings from dissertation research on the history of employee ownership in the United States.(more…)

Presented by James WolfingerAssociate Dean & Professor Secondary History at DePaul College of Education

Philadelphia exploded in violence in 1910. The general strike that year claimed the lives of some two dozen people and made Philadelphia a prominent point in the tumultuous national conflict over workers’ rights. That strike was a notable point, but not a unique one, in the history of Philadelphia’s transit system. My paper, “Running the Rails: A History of Capital and Labor in the Philadelphia Transit Industry,” outlines the chief arguments that I make in my recent book, Running the Rails (Cornell University Press, 2016), which details a generations-long history of conflict between the workers and management at one of the nation’s largest privately owned transit systems. In particular, I focus on how labor relations shifted from the 1880s to the 1960s as transit workers adapted to fast-paced technological innovation to keep the city’s people and commerce on the move while management sought to limit its employees’ rights. I argue that it is remarkable to see how much Philadelphia’s transit workers achieved. (more…)

Presented by Zaire Z. Dinzey-FloresAssociate Professor of Sociology and Latino and Caribbean Studies at Rutgers University

“Location, location, location…” so goes the trope for how real estate properties derive their value. But how does race figure in the attribution of value for a property and a neighborhood? Based on ethnographic and mixed-method research in two demographically-transitioning neighborhoods in 21st Century Brooklyn, Dinzey-Flores considers how neighborhood spaces and property interiors are aesthetically, discursively, and materially produced and crafted by real estate actors in ways that render previously socially de-valued neighborhoods “valuable” and “worthy” of investment. Of particular focus, is the way in which racial conceptualizations—of “blackness,” “Latino-ness”, or “whiteness”—are codified and “built in” in the social desirability and economic valuation process of properties and neighborhoods. (more…)